Kashi Foods
Kashi Foods had a vision for helping their customers to change their lives for the better. They contacted our client and asked for a website that would not only provide information on their products, but also enable the customers to commit to making a small change in their life and track their progress on the web. The goal of the site was to provide a place where people making similar life changes could gather and encourage each other as they made their progress. When development on the site hit difficulties, projectmechanix was brought in to help get it back on track.The main focus of the site was on making a user community, which involved heavy use of a database to store the user information. The food company also wanted to be able to add additional products and other features without needing additional programming, which required a very flexible way of saving information in a dynamic way instead of in static pages. In addition, since the site was already designed and partially built, minimal structural changes to the site were possible.
Challenge
- Site visitors want to enter personal information in a safe and controlled environment
- Visitors were looking for encouragement in making their life change
- Site information needed to be updated frequently and with a minimum of involvement from programmers
- New products would be added often, giving a very dynamic site feel
Solution
- Working within the existing structure, we added some features that were missing to enable easier administration of the site
- We optimized the database code to provide a faster response time to accommodate the number of users expected.
- New components were added to provide additional marketing opportunities within the site
- Security was enhanced to ensure the personal information of the users was not compromised.
Technologies
- MS SQL Server 2000
- ASP.NET
- Web Services
Timeframe
- 5 months
Results
We were able to get the project back on track by using automated system testing to find coding errors. We also improved the performance of the system by optimizing the database access code and the database structures without causing further problems in the system.